Abstract

The purpose of reading practice for poor readers is to establish general reading skills pertaining to words of specific orthographic types. The common practice is to focus on words that were read incorrectly. Errors then will be determined largely by random factors and by word specific characteristics that are immaterial for the general skill. The ensuing hypothesis, that practice on words that were read successfully will be as effective or even better than practice on failures, will be tested with poor readers from elementary schools. The related topic of homogeneity of the word sets involved will also be explored.